Robert Kaufman is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in, and is past co-director of, the interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory. Kaufman is the author of Negative Romanticism: Adornian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Modern Poetry (Cornell University Press in 2021), and is at work on two related books, Why Poetry Should Matter—to the Left: Frankfurt Constellations of Democracy and Modernism after Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the Future-Present of American Poetry. His essays on modern poetry, aesthetics, and critical theory have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes.